Sat January 7,
2012
Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant is
just weeks from operating at full
capacity, the country's top nuclear
official said Saturday.

Iran's Bushehr Nuclear
Power Plant Raises Concerns

No
Monitoring-

The
IAEA warned Iran’s nuclear regulatory
agency had “a shortage of staff” and the
existing workers who were under-trained
and under-funded.

Cost
Cutting-

The
cooling-system pumps were “supplied to
Bushehr in the 1970’sand, under the current
contract, Russia
was obliged to integrate them into the
project,”.

“To
cut costs the Russians had to agree to use
certain parts supplied by the Germans,”
said Bill Horak, who studies Soviet
and Russian-built reactors.

Bushehr
also sits at the junction of three
tectonic plates, raising concerns that
an earthquake could damage the plant and
crack its containment dome, or disrupt
the electrical supply needed to keep it
safe, said Dr. Jassem al-Awadi,
a geologist at the University of Kuwait. Bushehr
was hit with a 4.6 magnitude temblor in
2002.

Three
Russian nuclear scientists who
planned, designed, built and put into
operation Iran's first nuclear reactor
at Bushehr this year, died Tuesday
night, June 20 2011, when a
Rusaero flight from Moscow to Petrozavodsk
in northwest Russia crashed. The
three Russian scientists spent February
and March 2011 at Bushehr after the
Russian Nuclear Energy Commission insisted
that the nuclear fuel rods be removed
until they were sure the plant would not
explode. The rods have since been reloaded
and the reactor went online last month.

The
Bushehr plant overlooks the Persian Gulf
and is visible from several
miles away with its cream-colored
dome dominating the green landscape.
Soldiers maintain a 24-hour watch on roads
leading up to the plant, manning
anti-aircraft guns and supported by
numerous radar stations.

Bushehr
began in 1975 when the shah of Iran
awarded the contract to Kraftwerk Union of
Germany.

When
the German company pulled out after the
1979 Islamic revolution the two reactors
were far from finished, and they were damaged
during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88.

Airstrikes left the
containment vessel with 1700 holes,
letting in hundreds of tonnes of
rainwater.

The
regime revived the project in the 1990s,
but with one reactor only. It wanted a
prestige project to show that the Islamic
Republic could match the scientific
achievements of the West.

This
time, Iran used Russian engineers, who had
not built a foreign reactor since the
Soviet Union collapsed in 1989. Russia's
experts wanted to start from scratch. The
Iranians, having already spent more than
$1 billion, insisted they built on the
German foundations.

This
involved adapting a structure built for a
vertical German reactor to take a
horizontal Russian reactor - an
unprecedented operation. Of the 80,000
pieces of German equipment, many were
corroded or lacked manuals.

Moscow's
Centre for Energy and Security Studies, an
independent think tank, identified a
"shortage of skilled Russian engineering
and construction specialists with suitable
experience". It spoke of "frequent
problems with quality and deadlines" as
"every (Russian) subcontractor tried to
milk the Bushehr project for all it's
worth". In February a 30-year-old German
cooling pump broke, sending metal debris
into the system.